In Alex Gibney’s 2015 documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, a number of technology whizzes—Jobs included—make solemn pronouncements about how they expect Apple products to change the world. The validity of these remarks is arguable: much as I like my iPhone and would not want to go without it, I would not claim that it has changed my life so much as it has simplified tasks that I previously handled in different, less efficient ways. The comments in the movie stand as instances of the technological fallacy: the idea that technologies inevitably alter the development of the societies that employ them.
Mark Kurlansky is an ardent opponent of that idea, and he spends a goodly portion of his new book, Paper: Paging through History, refuting the proposition and demonstrating the means by which societies have adapted technology, in this case paper, writing, and printing, in the course of their evolutions.
Like the invention of written language, the development of paper and the means by which it took hold as a substrate for written communication and record-keeping is the subject of a good deal of conjecture. We can be fairly sure that paper was first made in quantity from about 105 ADonward in China, where it was quickly adopted to serve the functions of a burgeoning bureaucracy, though also to fill a multitude of other needs: packaging, currency, and ritual offerings in temples and tombs. As China exported its culture throughout Asia, paper